And they overcame him by the Blood of the Lamb, and by the word of their testimony, and they loved not their lives unto death. (Rev. 12:11)
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Feb 13, 2015

Technocratic Death Drive, or the Historic Push for Eugenics

Those who constantly lean on the bad science of evolution never seem to acknowledge their origin. Darwin's infamous "On The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection" is quite famous, but the sub-title is always left out. It reads; "Or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life". So who are the favoured races? The Bible teaches only one race, the "Human" race, but evolution teaches some are more "evolved" than others. Apparently the color of your skin, or the education you were afforded growing up, perhaps the political ideals you hold true, these things separate those who are "favoured" from those who should be sterilized or euthanized.

The Communists and the Fascists of World War II both held ideas of racial superiority based on ethnicity or IQ. And so did the state sponsored educational institutions of the U.S.A. For more background on this, read on...Hearts & Likes
People are able to discern good from evil. More or less everybody will recognize and condemn an atrocity exhibited on their TV screens, provided they have no stake in it. In this respect, social networks present us with a panoramic display of humanity’s certainty in its moral principles. Namely, that’s where thousands upon thousands like the photo of some little, dying “angel” and write condemnatory comments under the picture of some sadist caught poisoning dogs. Whether they are themselves good or evil is immaterial. They passed their judgments and ascertained what is and what is not good. Admittedly, the principles providing them with the capability for moral judgment are rarely explicitly defined. Yet who would doubt, for instance, the sanctity of human life and the obligation to respect its final act as unquestionable values? The virtual heart and like under the photo of the gravely ill child, as well as the hateful commentary on the dog killer, clearly prove this fact.
Or do they?
Judging by the way things are going: no, they do not. Fleeting certainties of life are in fact its underlying principles. But nowadays man is offered a bold and final step over their boundaries. He is carried by a gushing stream of illusory freedom, springing from the illusory affirmation of importance by its consumers, i.e. continual progress in consummation of human rights. It is the demolition of everything that once was, without second thought, accepted as good and evil, and the institution of a system defining ‘acceptable’ and ‘unacceptable’. All is good if it’s not evil, and evil itself is nothing because it’s not good. In that sense there are no limits to freedom if there are no rational reasons for them, so the final sanctuary of the irrational, a final possible evil, is brought to judgment. It is death itself and its occasional accomplice – murder. “The right to die,” or opting to end one’s life by the hand of another, becomes the demand that can’t be ignored. The right to euthanasia is slowly but surely creeping up the list of human rights advocates’ priorities. And really, why hit the brakes when the highway of freedom is infinite and every few miles we storm by that jumbo-scale billboard that shouts, “Because you deserve it!”?

Here is why. Man must wake up in the middle of the night, sits up in his sweat-soaked bed and asks himself, “If death is my right, isn’t it therefore my duty?”

Early Euthanasia Movement and the Nazi Stigma
Euthanasia is a term still bearing the burden of dark connotations, and its contemporary advocates are all too careful to avoid using it explicitly. No surprise there because, however you flip it, Thanatos arouses no pleasing sensations, even if you pin eu- to it. Also, we must not forget that “mercy killing” in the previous century had its first legal coming-out party in Nazi Germany in the form of the Aktion T4[1] program conducted from 1939 to 1941, and aimed at the “mercy killing” of children and adults deemed “unfit to live”. Bearing in mind that, alongside the lethal injection and nutrition deprivation, it also premiered in the experimental gas chambers, it is strongly believed that Aktion T4 was a sort of exercise in preparation for the death camps. The program was publicly canceled on the 23rd of July, 1941, because Hitler had to respond to sermons by the bishop of Münster, Clemens von Galen,[2] who unequivocally condemned the whole affair. However, the euthanasia program continued incognito, and the bishop’s clerical cadre was cut down to size.

Hitler’s experiment in eugenics almost unintentionally “mercy-killed” the young euthanasia movement in the West. Ignoring the state of affairs across the Atlantic, the Euthanasia Society of America,[3] founded in New York in 1938, committed something along the lines of botched PR-suicide, when in the wake of World War II, it openly advocated the primary purpose of euthanasia as being the removal of “undesirable creatures”, meaning erasing those they deemed unfit for dignified life. In the clear words of its representative, neurologist Foster Kennedy[4], the overall purpose was conceived as mercy for “nature’s mistakes”, the mercy killing of “a person, who is not a person”. Such straightforwardness – seldom present among the contemporary advocates of euthanasia, as we shall see – is due to close ties between early euthanasia initiatives and the eugenics movement. In the age of the rise of Nazism and the beginning of the WWII, it proved to be a terrible advertising experiment. Euthanasia advocates had to wait for the revolutionary changes of the sixties in order to make a public comeback free from fear of lynching, although this time endowed with strict rhetorical discipline and new names for their organizations.

The mastheads must be another coincidence.

But we must wonder, would all this fuss have taken place if not for Hitler? Eugenics,[5] or science of selection and nurture of desirable individuals was, before WWII, practically mainstream among American financial and scientific elites. The point of agreement with euthanasia advocates was the idea of systematization of acceptable and unacceptable species in a society conceived as a kind of zoo, admittedly not on the grounds of a Nazi-like Volk, but on the grounds of what we now call “quality of life” and the “autonomy of the individual”. In those days the term was “the pursuit of happiness,” in the sense of an individual’s right to accomplish material satisfaction, or enjoyment of life, as guaranteed by law. It is interesting to note, and at the same time seemingly hard to understand: wherein lies the autonomy of a sick child being killed by physician like a blind puppy? It is interesting because the accent of euthanasia movement in USA and UK before World War Two was laid precisely on “cleansing” society of infants unfit for quality autonomous life, while only since the nineteen-seventies do we find it staked as a right of conscious and autonomous individuals, mostly elderly people. But where there is a will there is a way. And where there is a way, there’s no trouble in procuring the logic. We’ll return to that later.